June 15, 2014

Just after posting the 14th and 15th retractions of Ulrich Lichtenthaler — in Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice — I received emails from two faithful readers pointing to his 16th retraction, in the Journal of Engineering and Technology Management (JET-M).

As with one of the ETP articles, it was co-authored with Miriam Muethel, who overlapped at WHU with Dr. Lichtenthaler when they both completed their habilitation.

The article was published in the April-June 2012 issue of JET-M. The retraction notice states:

This article has been retracted by agreement between the first author (Ulrich Lichtenthaler), and the Editor-in-Chief. The retraction has been agreed based on discussions about the presentation of the empirical results following an investigation conducted by the Journal. The second author was not involved in the empirical analyses. The first author assumes full responsibility.

The editor in chief of JET-M is Jeremy Hall of Simon Fraser.

Lichtenthaler Retractions: Two Years Later

The first retraction of any article by Dr. Lichtenthaler began in June 2012 with an article retracted by Strategic Organization. At the end of 2012, I summarized the first calendar year of retractions of Licthenthaler articles, when the retraction count stood at 8 articles.

Of the subsequent 8 retractions, two came from LES studies and two came from papers that seemed to use the LES data but didn’t say so directly (as did the SMJ retraction).

The two Lichtenthaler & Muethel articles — one in ETP and one in JET-M — used the LES data, but sampled only the smaller companies. As the JET-M article said

To avoid overlaps with earlier empirical studies (e.g., Lichtenthaler et al., 2010), we selected companies that are ranked on ranks 201–500 of the largest firms in terms of revenues in each of the following three industries: automotive, chemicals, and electronics.

While 16 articles by Dr. Licthenthaler have been retracted, at least 35 have not — a considerable output. Six of the 35 articles are literature reviews. Seven of these articles are in journals that have already retracted at least one Lichtenthaler article — implying that these articles in their journal have been vetted and passed the test.

Of the 22 remaining articles, 17 were published in six journals that have published multiple Licthenthaler articles but not yet retracted any:

California Management Review (2)

IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management (2)

MIT Sloan Management Review (2)

R & D Management (5)

Research-Technology Management (2)

Technovation (4)

I don’t have any information about the process at any of these six journals. Perhaps the two managerial journals (CMR and Sloan) are different, in that they aren’t about statistical tests, the managerial novelty of each article was vetted prior to publication, and that overlap with academic articles is a common and accepted practice.

As for the four academic journals, I don’t know the status of their evaluation of the Lichtenthaler papers — or whether they are even doing an evaluation. From a strictly Bayesian standpoint, I think it unlikely that none of the 13 articles in these four journals demonstrate defects comparable to those of the 16 articles retracted thus far.

Update Sunday 10:30am: According to a reader who studied the methods in more than 20 of the Licthenthaler papers, none of the four of the Technovation papers had problems similar to those of the retracted papers.

Bibliography

The full list of Lichtenthaler (or Holger Ernst) retracted papers (not including the three withdrawn papers):

Lichtenthaler, Ulrich (2008). “Externally commercializing technology assets: An examination of different process stages,” Journal of Business Venturing, 23 (4): 445-464. doi: 10.1016/j.jbusvent.2007.06.002 (Retracted by the editor and author, November 2012)

Holger Ernst, James G. Conley, Nils Omland (2012). “How to create commercial value from patents: The role of patent management,” Research Policy, published online 21 May 2012. doi: 10.1016/j.respol.2012.04.012 (Retracted by the authors and editor prior to print publication, February 2013)

Lichtenthaler, Ulrich (2012). "Technological Turbulence and the Impact of Exploration and Exploitation Within and Across Organizations on Product Development Performance," Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, published online 5 June 2012, doi: 10.1111/j.1540-6520.2012.00520.x. (Retracted by the author, executive editor and publisher, June 2014).

Lichtenthaler, Ulrich, and Miriam Muethel (2012). "The role of deliberate and experiential learning in developing capabilities: Insights from technology licensing," Journal of Engineering and Technology Management, 29 (2): 187–209, DOI: 10.1016/j.jengtecman.2011.10.001. (Retracted by the first author and the editor-in-chief, June 2014)

June 13, 2014

Two years after his first retraction — and six months after his most recent retraction — this week Ulrich Lichtenthaler received his 14th and 15th retractions from Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice.

One is for an accepted article published online a year ago (5 June 2012), but not yet in print. The Wiley website says:

The above article from Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, “Technological turbulence and the impact of exploration and exploitation within and across organizations on product development performance,” by Ulrich Lichtenthaler, published online on April 2012 in Wiley Online Library, DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6520.2012.00520.x, has been retracted by agreement between the author, the Executive Editor, D. Ray Bagby, and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. The retraction has been agreed before print publication based on discussions about the presentation of the empirical results.

This paper appears to have no citations, even in Google Scholar.

The other, entitled “The Impact of Family Involvement on Dynamic Innovation Capabilities: Evidence From German Manufacturing Firms,” was published online last September and appear in print in November’s special issue on family business. The article was co-authored with Miriam Muethel, who then (and today) is at the WHU Otto Beisheim School of Management. Dr. Muethel received her habilitation at WHU in December 2011, not long after Lichtenthaler completed his habilitation there.

There is no explanation (yet) for the decision to retract this article, which apparently ETP has been considering for more than a year. It has 10 citations in Google Scholar, but only one of them from a major journal (a citation by the introduction to the ETP special issue).

Although Prof. Lichtenthaler lost his license to teach nine months ago, no official announcement has been made about his position as a chaired professor at the University of Mannheim. However, according to hearsay, he has been recently investigating other career opportunities.

Bibliography

The full list of Lichtenthaler (or Holger Ernst) retracted papers (not including the three withdrawn papers):

Lichtenthaler, Ulrich (2008). “Externally commercializing technology assets: An examination of different process stages,” Journal of Business Venturing, 23 (4): 445-464. doi: 10.1016/j.jbusvent.2007.06.002 (Retracted by the editor and author, November 2012)

Holger Ernst, James G. Conley, Nils Omland (2012). “How to create commercial value from patents: The role of patent management,” Research Policy, published online 21 May 2012. doi: 10.1016/j.respol.2012.04.012 (Retracted by the authors and editor prior to print publication, February 2013)

Lichtenthaler, Ulrich (2012). "Technological Turbulence and the Impact of Exploration and Exploitation Within and Across Organizations on Product Development Performance," Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, published online 5 June 2012, doi: 10.1111/j.1540-6520.2012.00520.x. (Retracted by the author, executive editor and publisher, June 2014).

June 6, 2014

On Tuesday, Frank Piller and I hosted a successful workshop on 3D printing at RWTH Aachen. About 30 people attended the workshop: half from RWTH Aachen, the rest from other academic venues and a few from industry.

In many ways, 3D printing research reminds me of open source software research in 2001 or 2002. Frank says there is an explosion of research on 3D printing (i.e. more like OSS in 2005): I'm guessing this is concentrated in Europe because I’m not seeing it in the US. (But then, some of the early OSS research was phenomenon-based, which tends not to count much in U.S. business schools).

We had a deep dive into the science with Reinhart Poprawe, who's both managing director of the Fraunhofer-Institut für Lasertechnik ILT and a professor at RWTH Aachen. With the rise of RepRap, MakerBot and other consumer technologies, most of us are familiar with the plastic (mostly FDM) 3D printing, but his focus is the high-quality, high-speed production of metal parts for industrial uses — which are the future of 3D printing as a manufacturing technique.

Joel West (photo by Frank Piller)

As an economic historian, I gave an overview of the first 30 years of 3D printing, outlining the path from the industrial prototyping companies of the 1980s (notably 3D Systems and Stratasys) through to the dozens of consumer-focused startups of this century. I noted three trends fueling the latter movement: the “maker” movement,open design communities and the expiration of a key patent. (Alas, I gave the talk in casual clothes, without benefit of the suitcase that AirBerlin delivered 24 hours after I arrived in Aachen.)

The RWTH Aachen business school (Frank) and the Cambridge Institute for Manufacturing (Simon Ford) summarized their respective research agendas. Not surprisingly, Frank’s group is interested in mass customization while Cambridge is using UK money “to examine the reality and the potential of digital fabrication for the UK economy.”

Thierry Rayna described how 3D printing is changing business model innovation, while Letizia Mortara talked about classifying 73 different maker spaces into 13 categories. Christian Weller of RWTH described experiments of allowing consumers to customize products and how they felt about their willingness to pay.

In our debrief, I noted the need to build a community of researchers that (as with the early days of OSS) read and build upon each other’s work. We don’t (or won’t) have a management journal, but there are several conferences. The best is Frank's track on “Open Innovation and Additive Manufacturing” at the annual (von Hippel) Open and User Innovation Conference (where I hope to present). In June 2016, the Cambridge IfM group will be hosting the R&D Management Conference, so that’s another natural fit.

European OI researchers have also been fond of the annual ISPIM conference: the program for next week’s conference in Dublin mentions “open innovation,” including a plenary session on OI led by Wim Vanhaverbeke and a talk by Wim on the forthcoming New Frontiers in Open Innovation (Oxford, 2014). While 3D printing and additive manufacturing are nowhere mentioned at this year’s conference, there’s always next year.